Measuring the impacts of a multi-year social-change initiative is a considerable challenge in itself.
The Community Clinics Initiative (CCI) needed an evaluation that would provide more than an after-the-fact report. A joint program of Tides and The California Endowment, CCI wanted its grant programs to help clinics improve health outcomes in underserved communities and build the overall capacity of the community clinics field.
To meet this pair of bold goals, CCI offered a combination of grantmaking programs and grantee supports to the community-clinics field. Rather than operate with a full blueprint for how and when funds are released, CCI learned from the experience of its grantees to design new ventures and improve existing grantmaking programs in an iterative fashion.
To help them operate in this manner, CCI needed an evaluation partner that could assess its grantmaking programs quickly and with agility to convey useful information that could be put to immediate use.
At BTW, CCI found an evaluation team with a collaborative approach to evaluation design that matched the Initiative’s emergent qualities.
Our BTW team’s choice of evaluation methods—including dynamic exchanges of information with grantees—ensured useful, real-time feedback for CCI. BTW also provided a variety of tailored summaries of what was being learned for CCI’s use with clinic leaders and broader philanthropic and policy audiences.
CCI has used the evaluation findings to ensure that their grantmaking remains responsive and strategic (see the BTW paper Making the Most of Evaluation). They also depend on the ongoing stream of findings and observations from BTW to inform their field-building work.
The evaluation has helped CCI improve the impact of its grants, its technical assistance and its convenings. With a greater body of knowledge about their grantees and the impacts of their grantmaking, CCI has confidently supported the clinics that are the greatest risk takers.
The combination of programs and strategies that has emerged through CCI has built up the capacity of community clinics within California, enhanced the community clinics’ identity as a field and heightened awareness of clinic needs in state and national policy arenas.
